Hubbert’s Peak Theory Points to Dwindling Oil Supply

HUBBERT’S PEAK IS not a mountain, but it’s just as good at hiding whatever’s on the other side. One anonymous day in the not-too-distant future it will be the most crowded place on Earth. And coming down won’t be nearly as much fun as going up.

Hubbert’s Peak is named for M. King Hubbert, a prickly but brilliant Shell geologist who went to a meeting of his colleagues from the petroleum industry in 1956 and told them that they had 15 good years left, at most, before U.S. oil production peaked and began a rapid decline.


Hubbert’s paper marshaled the historical record of mature U.S. deposits, mathematical modeling and geological facts to posit a distinctive bell curve for the available reserves of fossil fuel on any scale, with exponential growth on the left as extraction ramps up, and a symmetrical decline on the right as the dinosaur mush is depleted.

Hubbert then showed how the right shoulder of the curve could be stretched with improved technologies and additional deposit finds. But the basic premise didn’t change: It would take us decades, rather than centuries, to exhaust the bulk of the energy stored within the Earth over the preceding 500 million years.

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